Louise Wilson's Vogue Interview

Emily is the deputy editor of British Vogue and the associate digital director of Vogue.co.uk

Monday 19 May 2014

Chris Brooks

Following Louise Wilson's death this weekend, revisit Vogue deputy editor Emily Sheffield's revealing interview with the formidable Central Saint Martins professor, who was responsible for shaping the talent and careers of some of the most influential designers of our time.

Since the late Thirties, Central Saint Martins had been a shambolic warren of austere corridors off Charing Cross Road - much loved, much maligned, but bursting at its seams with creativity and folklore. Today you approach this prestigious art school across a wide, clean vista of shooting water fountains, and enter through high glass doors into what was once a granary, behind King's Cross, but is now a colossus of flash modernity. On the third floor, practically cloud level, resides Professor Louise Wilson OBE, the infamous director of its infamous fashion MA course.

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"Fucking moron," a voice storms as a student fast exits her office, followed by models in various toiles. "Oh, it's you," Louise grins cheerily, as she appears - agile in step, in her uniform of draped black and glittering silver rings - at its doorway. "Come in, come in," she says, ushering me inside. "Next!" she hollers.

It's a Wednesday in June, only days before the end of term, and the students are showing their pre-collections to Louise and two of the course tutors. Outside in the airy sunlit studio, normal, quiet, collective activity has switched to frenzied preparation. The next student enters and Louise sits, formidable, terrifying, behind a white expanse of desk - piles of Self Service magazines neatly stacked at one end, a white lamp at the other (which she unnervingly switches on and off during the session, increasing the sense of torturous interrogation) - an intent scowl at the ready. Her face is elastic, capable of huge, visceral swathes of emotion, and she can artfully manipulate her body to brilliant comic effect or loom menacingly.

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Stretching upwards behind her is a wall of layered memorabilia, recreated from her previous office: Louis Vuitton show invites, postcards, sayings such as "The world revolves around me," and (her favourite) "Same shit, different year; we have nothing to say and we're still saying it." Plus notes from friends in the industry, Phoebe Philo, for instance, and John Galliano's student card that she found in the archives. Beside her for this critique sits Jane Shepherd (womenswear tutor), heavy black fringe almost covering her eyes, imperceptible. Then, at the end, Fabio Piras (womenswear and menswear), whose dulcet Italian tones do little to soften his rapier comments - Louise is not the only one to lash with her tongue, she just does it louder.

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And so they begin. I watch three students in all, and with each one this crack team zeroes in with drone-like accuracy on their work, dissecting every angle, every motive, giving a barrage of exasperated insults. The work is "horrific" or "a bloody disaster". They chip, chip away at any disparity between research and design.

"How can we have toiles without drawings to explain what they're meant to be?" Jane asks. Louise adds, more forcefully, "And no problem solving, no colour application, no sense of how your colours or fabrics apply." "Where are your swatches? It's pathetic," she yells to another. At times, her voice rises to an angry crescendo, one hand theatrically tossing strands of long auburn hair off her shoulder, or switching on and off that bloody light again, before she adds blithely, "I mean, I'm just sharing." Then come deafening silences. Louise stares, the student is frozen or stubbornly furious, Jane rolls her eyes before Fabio drills through their pretensions, laziness, confusion. Louise raises her hands, shouting at one recalcitrant student, "You've got more talent than this and you've just squandered it," before laying her forehead on the desk and banging it, gently. "I do not understand having research and not using it," she moans into the woodwork.

Simon Cowell doesn't have a patch on this lot. "It would make good television, wouldn't it," quips Louise at one point, before adding quietly, "We will get there. It's the same every year. It's brutal, it's like waking people from a coma." For under the drama and the layers of excruciating sarcasm, every comment is deserved, their scrutiny methodical. Slowly, they pick away, fishing out the slivers of talent from the detritus, until, like gleaming pearls, they emerge stubbornly from their shells. And unlike any of Cowell's talent shows, the aim is not to publicly humiliate. Louise frets endlessly that I protect the students' identities.

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"I've never met a person like Louise," says Christopher Kane, with a wry laugh, of his tutor and friend. "Incomparable," adds the straight-talking fashion writer Sarah Mower. "She is incredibly involved, incredibly thorough," recalls Simone Rocha, who graduated in 2010. "When you're in there it's the most intense experience you will ever have, it's like hell," she grimaces, shuddering at the memory of the build-up to the February catwalk show. "But at the end you see what you've achieved and realise you couldn't do it without her."

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Louise is a character so huge and complicated, multifarious and multifaceted, so achingly funny and sharp, you will sink or swim in her presence. Such is the maverick, un-PC nature of her methods that Louise's reputation often precedes that of the college. And this year she celebrates her two-decade reign there, during which the cream of British talent has emerged from her tutelage. Too many to list, but Alexander McQueen, Giles Deacon, Christopher Kane, Jonathan Saunders, Louise Goldin and Mary Katrantzou are among the celebrated alumni.

Who knows what alchemic magic she conjures behind those locked doors, but the results prove her methods. Of the 48 or so students who graduated last year, over half are boosting the ground talent of the world's most powerful fashion houses, while another 12 have launched their own labels, exhibiting as part of Newgen and Fashion East or Vauxhall Fashion Scout. Of this summer's crop, one student has already been appointed at Yves Saint Laurent under Hedi Slimane, another to menswear at McQueen. Designers and headhunters alike rely on her counsel. "For many fashion-house heads, she's their world centre," Mower, a contributing editor at US Vogue, vouches stoutly of her friend. "Ever since I landed in Paris, I've always got Louise's advice," agrees Lanvin's Alber Elbaz. "If she says I have to take a guy, I know she is right."

"Yes, Louise is brutally direct in her criticism, but incredibly funny with it, much of which is lost on the students," shrugs Jane, with typical understatement, of her friend and colleague. Louise breaks people down to who they are, that's what produces such excellence. "Oh God, the amount you learn about yourself when you are in there," sighs Rocha in her warm Irish lilt. "At the end I knew so much about my identity, what I wanted to design. When you are young, you have all these ideas. Louise can filter straight through them."

"You don't have to take her criticism to heart, after all," adds Kane, who studied with Louise until 2006. "People like to talk about she's crazy this, crazy that, she swears a lot. But the other side of her is so compassionate, she's always going to give up so much time for you."

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Days earlier, I arrive for our interview and Louise is mid-flow, battling for her students as usual, this time about delayed equipment: "Oh, well, I'm thrilled, yes, right, great!" she shudders furiously at browbeaten project manager Peter Armsworth. "So the students will have audio visual for the last two weeks of term. I mean, I can't be pleasant - I'm trying. But thanks for coming up," she continues witheringly. Sent on his way, severely chastised, but only after he's batted away another furious inquisition on the previous day's broken air-conditioning, which lost the students six hours' work. "So that won't be happening again then?" she booms, as he scurries to his escape.

There's never a dull moment with Louise: she whips from one topic to another, one emotion to another, laughing, weeping, shouting; there's always an opinion, always a reference, be it Raiders of the Lost Ark, writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, the stylish American socialite Lee Radziwill, or photographer Slim Aarons. "She says and knows so much," says Kane. "She's an encyclopedia - oh, don't tell her I said that! She'll love that!"

"Are you comfy there?" she inquires, in her Estuary-infected Scottish rumble. "I've got a great chair, built especially for a bad back, a slidey mat and a footrest. And you can be on the cheap John Lewis lookalike."

Louise was born in Cambridgeshire, a wealthy farmer's daughter, and from the age of three, horses were her ruling passion. "I wasn't fat then," she says quickly. When she was 10, her father moved to a farm in Scotland and she recalls - reluctantly, she is not keen on personal detail (personal opinion, that's a different matter) - a privileged, "quite wild" childhood where she and her sister were allowed to graffiti in charcoal on the kitchen walls, the tennis court was overrun with their horses and her mother wore her old couture clothes in the evening to keep warm. She competed and often won in horse eventing - "Yeah, I was very competitive," she says. The school would write and complain after seeing her ride past on the way to a competition. "And I was in the papers," she corrects.

"I have no unhappy memories of my childhood. Except I am a compulsive overeater. Honestly, I wish there was something in the past so I could heal it and become a size 14. I've had regression therapy… Nothing," she shrugs, grinning. At the local school she was "good" at art (her word; "excelled" is more likely); "I didn't have to try hard, I just did something I liked. I still don't view my job as work, it's my hobby."

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I wonder if she was a confident teenager. "I don't think anyone's confident," she retorts. "What I'm saying is I didn't have a troubled childhood. In a way, I'm most unconfident. I'd love to be charming and softly spoken but that's never going to happen. If I was, I'd probably be able to network my way out of here more easily." I question whether she really wants to leave Saint Martins; colleagues say she's talked of quitting for 10 years. "That's not the right question," she snaps back good-humouredly. "Do I want to be in education for the next 15 years? No, absolutely not. It's got nothing to do with Saint Martins; it's just education has fundamentally changed."

This is her major gripe and a theme she often returns to: before educational grants were cut, art college was a rite of passage. "You think, great, I like art, I'll go to art college. You didn't have to think about it that hard because you were getting a grant. Now people are investing thousands of pounds. Art back then was just a stepping stone to whatever - film, fashion - whereas now education is perceived to be the final rung, it has to deliver absolutely everything." Imagination, inspiration is more mercurial, she argues. "People have life plans now, whereas we never did. It's a seismic change, things happened by osmosis."

In fact, Louise's route to art college - Preston Polytechnic, then Saint Martins - was less accidental, more forceful parental intervention (and her father petitioned the local MP to get her a bursary): "I was going to do business studies in Newcastle because there were a lot of nightclubs," she says. "My father said if I went that route he'd never speak to me again, credit where credit's due."

Arriving at Saint Martins, in the late Seventies, she found "an exclusive club of like-minded people, a round peg in a round hole, as it were". Nights were spent in Taboo or Café de Paris, in "things we had made and whichever bit of designer gear you'd saved up for, a Gaultier scarf or whatever".

Afterwards, she went to work for Les Copains and Gianfranco Ferré in Italy; "I never really liked Italy. 'Lots of cement' is my long-standing quote." Then it was back to London, working with a denim brand, then a high-street company. "Then I taught, then I went to be head of Donna Karan, then I did consultancy, then I taught," she drones comically. "I think the important thing is that I have worked consistently, therefore I know what the industry requires, so it's not just vocational teaching."

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In the meantime she met Timmi, her gracious, good-looking Ghanaian partner. And they had a son, Tim, aged 22. "He's 6ft 7in," she says proudly. Teaching was, she says, the only way to survive. "There wasn't really a fashion industry here in 1989, so if you had a child you were buggered." After two years as creative director at Donna Karan, she returned in 1999 as course director. In truth, she had been teaching at Saint Martins regularly since she left as a student: this is the loyalty of the place. Most of her colleagues were Saint Martins students; two former students of hers: Fleet Bigwood, head of print, and Peter Jensen, a Dane, who teaches menswear. Even Bobby, Louise's old course director, is still floating cheerfully in and out of her office, waving bits of paper at her that she must sign. "We're close-knit, like a family," says Jane. "Most of us are 'lifers'."

They congregate in Louise's office, and occasionally a student wanders in nervously with new Pepsico T-shirt designs that need signing off or for feedback on a previous tutorial. Fleet is Louise's constant support, they're "always bickering", like a married couple, he laughs. Even at home, they are on the phone discussing the students. He says she hasn't changed since she taught him: "Still the same - gobby, aggressive, slightly violent - but also the kindest, most generous person." All that has changed is the outfits. When he was a student, he recalls her "coming into college wearing Chanel or Moschino, all these labels, and you'd go, 'God, she is glamorous!'" Now it's elegant, made-to-measure black.

What strikes you most, apart from the easy geniality, diligence and "we're all in this shit together" attitude, is the loyalty they all have to their prescient commander. "I think many in this department would consider whether we would stay if Louise left," says Peter. When I ask him what single attribute makes her better than the rest, he flips back: "She cares."

Apart from the day-to-day tutorials and the mad, stressful, adrenaline-fuelled six months that lead up to every February's MA graduation show (which is when Louise's contact with the students really kicks in, and, yes, she has thrown shoes), Louise toils to raise money - be it for scholarships or sewing machines, hardship funds for struggling students or machinists. "For us, funding is vital," she says calmly, "due to the cuts in education, which is standard. I mean, it wouldn't matter about students getting their bursaries, we still need sponsorship to provide the level we want." There are also the 750 or so applicants' portfolios she must sift through every year - it's an arduous process. Despite the bluff and silly jokes, her team's eye is infallible - "She cuts through the pretence on paper," says Jane, and together they take risks on those they sense have a design voice, however buried.

Louise's capacity for hard work is well-known: two bouts of cancer didn't stop her coming to the office every day; only Timmi's perseverance - he ferried her to and from work in a battered black Vauxhall - ensured she made her hospital appointments. "Particularly around show time, when everything's full-on and maximum stress, you do fear for her health and sanity," worries Jane. "But she loves and lives for it, the concept of 'that'll do' never enters her consciousness."

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Louise visibly squirms if you ask why she gets results. She doesn't like anything to be prescriptive, especially teaching. "Every day is chaotic here, you never think you're good, you never think that the work the students are producing is good, and I think that's healthy. I don't know any other way than stress," she admits. "It's the dynamic of going over the trenches with them rather than directing them from the operations room. You live it with the students."

Every year they start over with the students. "They've been in the education system since they were five," she continues. "At school, it's all about jumping through hoops, not necessarily learning how to think in a different way. If your work is shit, who cares if you get 76 per cent? Marc Jacobs doesn't. It's about the work in hand."

"She asks a lot of what inspires you," recalls Jonathan Saunders, "whether these things will give you enough fuel to give you an identity. It's irrespective of taste; it's making sure you know who you are as a designer. She says, if you want to do this then push it to its limit." "Her message," adds Kane, "is you've got to work your guts out, there's always going to be someone better than you. She wants so much out of people, and when they let her down it's hard."

Louise is an easy person to parody - the tantrums and screaming matches - but this would be to ignore what a serious person she is, serious about education, dedicated to the detriment of her health. And she has no comeback to why she does it, year after year, except that it's a privilege, as she sees it, to work with the young - Saint Martins is perhaps an addiction, she admits.

I see equal affection and haranguing while I am there, as much as anything she teases students. Nothing is off-limits. "Masturbating in front of lesbian porn on your computer," she jokes (she loves a weird analogy) to one girl during the discussion of a lace project. Then moments later, clearly proud, praising another's beautiful appliqué: "It's sort of like Meadham Kirchhoff for Chanel."

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There is a life outside college, despite the long hours she keeps (dare any student to leave before she does). She's a keen gardener. She'd just seen Kanye West three times at the O2 Arena and, every month, she DJs at the George & Dragon pub in east London with her best friend, hairstylist John Vial. He describes an extraordinary collection of books and art and an immaculate house, pared down, über-modern, decorated with the same exacting standards she applies at work. "It's tranquil and quiet," he insists. "The girl at home is different to the one at work." She has also never stopped designing; but says that her cancer put a stop to any consultancies.

In the summer she and Timmi escape to Bali, where she hoovers up 30 or so books in a week. "She's a sponge," says Fleet. "She absorbs everything, she reads like a maniac. Plus Hello!, Grazia, all that celebrity culture. And she'll tell me how to water the hydrangeas. She's like a sort of super mum. That's another reason the students respond to her, because they have a fashion matriarch."

You could fill a book on Louise. But she'd hate that. "There's no book of anybody alive that I haven't laughed at," she grimaces. "It's much better when they're dead." So I leave it to her friend Alber Elbaz to have the last word. "In a world of money and power, she stays in that college and helps the students become who they are," he states emphatically. "She could be a millionaire many times over, but she is always backstage, pushing the industry forward. She never takes a bow, but we know who she is."